New Tool For Testing Your Server's Speed From Around The World (1)

As part of the recent CDN test, I ended up spending a lot of time staring at Uptrends' output.

If you don't know Uptrends - it's a really useful website that includes a tool which tests the loading speed of a single file on your server from around the world.

Unfortunately, it doesn't present those results in a really useful way - like, say, in a spreadsheet. Instead, it puts them on a massive single page with no way to see averages, totals, or any other useful aggregate data.

I looked around, but couldn't find any useful tools to visualise this information better. So I ended up writing a parsing tool that turns an Uptrends test into a spreadsheet - and here it is!

Download The Tool

You'll need Ruby 1.9 (NOT 2.0) installed on your computer - if you're on Windows, you can get it from here.

You'll also need to install the Nokogiri "gem" for Ruby - do that by going to /bin in your Ruby folder on the command line, and then typing

gem install nokogiri

1. Download your Uptrends test using "Save As" on your browser. It should save a single page plus a subdirectory full of files called "checkurloncheckpoint_NUMBER.htm"
2. Put Parser.rb in the subdirectory with those files in it.
3. Rename the file called "checkurloncheckpoint.htm" to "checkurloncheckpoint_001.htm"
4. Run command.com as Administrator. From the command line, run "PATH TO RUBY/ruby.exe Parser.rb"
5. You should now have a file called "results.csv" in the same folder. Open it in your spreadsheet program of choice, and select semicolons as the seperator, not commas (it should be obvious what this means when you open it!). It should load in fine, and now you have your data in Actually Usable form!